Microsoft® SQL Server 2000 introduced several new features for querying database tables and receiving the results as an XML document. Web release 1 of SQLXML (XML for SQL Server) added Updategrams and XML Bulk Load functionality, as well as a host of other features to the SQL Server 2000 base.
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With XML support in SQL Server 2000, you can query SQL over HTTP with a URL, bring the data down to the browser, and manipulate it on the client machine. By adding Internet Explorer 5.0 to the mix and using XSL to convert the XML to HTML, you can lighten the load on your database server. Going still one step further, by using Vector Markup Language you can even create drawings on the fly using the data from your SQL queries.
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